Typically, electricity used to run computing devices, such as home computers, mobile devices, or servers in a server installation (e.g., data center, server farm, etc.) is fungible. Thus, different components of the electricity are indistinguishable from the perspective of the computing devices. For example, electricity can be provided by a variety of sources, such as renewable and non-renewable sources, but one cannot readily connect a computing device to an electrical grid and determine whether the computing device is running on renewable or non-renewable power. Since renewable and non-renewable energy are fungible, consumers have traditionally been indifferent to how electrical energy is sourced. However, as environmental considerations have come to the forefront of energy policy, the demand for “green” or renewable energy has increased substantially. Current mechanisms for distinguishing green energy from “brown” or fossil fuel energy are typically simple accounting mechanisms, e.g., an entity might buy a given amount of renewable electrical energy to meet regulatory requirements, obtain a tax credit, etc. However, the actual electrical energy that entity draws from the grid is typically still provided by both renewable and non-renewable sources.
Also, individual computing devices tend to draw electricity from a shared source such as an electrical grid. Typically, a given computing device can simply plug into an outlet and begin drawing power, and the operator of the computing device has somewhat limited mechanisms for monitoring and controlling how much power is consumed by the computing device. Ideally, the grid and/or computing device operators would have more refined mechanisms for allocating power consumption to individual computing devices and for monitoring power consumption by individual computing devices.